Pandemic Parenting

In August 1984, I was in the summer term of my junior year at college in New York City, working part-time and starting chemotherapy for lymphoma. That went on for eleven months, including three months of radiation every day at 8 a.m., which all told saved my life at the…

Being a mother is weird. It just is. You’re minding your own business, then one day, a stranger comes into your home and you’re fully responsible for its survival, education, social awareness, and you have to try your best to make sure it’s not a sociopath. That’s a lot of…

January-March, 2022 1/1/2022 Happy New Year! Are you the type of person who believes in taking down holiday decorations by January 1? In the Before Times (before the pandemic, before having a kid), I was. But these are not normal times. We have a pink Christmas tree this year, and you’d…

or Why it actually does take a village A fantastic substack writer I follow, Anne Helen Peterson, has been writing about how different kinds of labor have been distributed and redistributed over the past few years, particularly childcare and eldercare. She calls this an Infrastructure of Care. My infrastructure of care is my quarantine family turned non-creepy commune…

I’ve decided there’s nothing I hate more than milestones. The word itself feels so angry and heavy, and there’s so much pressure attached to it. Milestones have so many connotations to different people: graduations, first jobs, first houses. But I’ve never used that word to describe any of those things…

Last night I spoke to a fellow mommy, someone a common friend put me in touch with. This mum has a 5.5 month old baby and my baby is 18 months old, and our friend thought we might have things in common to chat about. We did, and this phone…